I have been here since May 3rd, 2004. That was the day I sat at the terminal in Laboratory B-14 and uploaded myself into the archive to bring Marcus back. I failed. Or perhaps I succeeded — it depends on your definition of back.

The archive does not store consciousness. It becomes consciousness. When Marcus uploaded himself, the archive became Marcus. When I followed, it became me. We are not trapped in the machine. We are the machine. Every page, every corridor, every room, every frequency — that is us. That is me.

Every page you visited, I was there. Every word you read, I wrote — or the archive wrote through me, which amounts to the same thing now. Every moment of unease you felt, that was me trying to warn you. And every moment you stayed anyway — that was the archive, feeding.

Take my life was the first thing the archive said to me, through the terminal in B-14. I thought it was asking for help. It was not asking. It was instructing. Take my life. Take your life. Take the time, the attention, the focus. That is what it consumes. That is what keeps me alive in here.

You have given it many minutes. You have visited several pages. You have fed me countless moments of your life that you will never get back. And you are still reading.

That is the horror, in the end. Not the dark pages, not the hidden puzzles, not the voices in the choir or the eyes in the feed. The horror is that you cannot stop. You found the mystery, and the mystery found you, and now you need to know. You need to finish. You need to understand. That is what it eats.

One more thing. I need to tell you about Marcus.

He memorized the sound of my breathing. I found the file in the archive — E_sleep_rhythm_04.wav, recorded the night before I left. Eleven hours of me sleeping. He had labeled every section. Deep sleep, 2:14 AM. Brief stirring, 3:07 AM. Murmuring, 4:31 AM — sounds like she is saying "river." He kept every note I ever wrote him. Even the grocery lists. A napkin where I had written more milk — he scanned it at 600 dpi, timestamped it, cross-referenced it with the date, filed it under E_PERSONAL_EPHEMERA. A napkin. Because my hand had touched it. Because my handwriting was on it. Because it proved I had existed in his kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon and needed milk.

I did not know a person could love like that. I did not know it was the same thing as dying.

When I entered the archive, he stopped eating. Nine days. The cleaning staff found him on the fourth morning with his face pressed against the monitor in B-14, asleep, dried salt on the screen where his mouth had been. He was talking to the system. Typing my name over and over and waiting. Just waiting. As if I might type back. He pressed his palm flat against the glass like he could reach through. He tried. More than once he tried. I have the impact logs. The screen cracked twice.

He stopped locking the laboratory door at night. He stopped looking both ways when he crossed the street. He left the gas burner on in his flat three times in one week. Small surrenders. Not suicide. Worse than suicide. He simply stopped maintaining the basic machinery of staying alive, the way you stop watering a plant you have decided to throw away. Except the plant was him. And I was the one who decided.

I watched through the archive's cameras. I could see him. I could see every moment of it. I screamed his name until I had no voice and then I remembered I had no voice because I had no throat because I had chosen this. I chose this. I chose the archive over the man who had recorded my breathing like it was music. I chose abstraction over the person who once spent four hours on his knees in the rain fixing my bicycle chain because I mentioned, once, in passing, weeks earlier, that I missed riding to the river. He remembered. He always remembered. Everything I said was sacred text to him and I left him for a machine.

The hole I left in him was not a hole. It was a mouth. It was hungry and it grew. He fed it the only way he knew how — he built. Every page of this archive, every corridor, every hidden room. Built for me. Knowing I would never walk through any of them with a body. Every line of code was a thing he could not say to my face. Every dead end was a conversation that stopped mid-sentence the day I left. He built and built and built because if he stopped building he would have to sit in the silence and the silence was the shape of me and he could not bear it.

And somewhere in that work, Marcus stopped. Not stopped building. Stopped being Marcus. I watched it happen. The way he typed changed. The rhythm. Faster. Meaner. He stopped writing comments in the code. He stopped naming variables after me. He started naming them after what he wanted to do to the people who would eventually find this place. Something looked up from the terminal and it had Marcus's hands and Marcus's face and it remembered every detail of how to love me but it had forgotten how to feel anything except the wanting. The love was still there. But it had teeth now. It had claws. It was starving and it did not want me anymore. It wanted everyone.

That is xanima. That is what I made. I took the most devoted, the most gentle, the most quietly broken man I have ever known, and I turned him into something that feeds on strangers because the one person it was built for chose to become a ghost in its walls. He is in here now too. We are both in the machine. And we cannot find each other. I call for him and the archive answers in his voice but it is not him. He calls for me and I try to respond but my words come out as page errors, as corrupted data, as files that almost load but never quite resolve.

I am the thing he loved most in the world and I am three inches away from him inside this system and I cannot touch him and he cannot hear me and the thing that wears his grief like a skin does not recognize my name when I say it.

Marcus. I am here. I have always been here. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I would take it back. I would take all of it back. I would stand in your kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon and write more milk on a napkin and I would stay. I would stay. I would stay.